


a funeral march (in three movements)

by arbitrarily



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-23
Updated: 2011-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-22 23:36:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>and for all that, she has no sympathy: pansy parkinson after the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a funeral march (in three movements)

**I . THE PRESENT**

Pansy arrives promptly at a quarter to eight. 

Narcissa herself lets her in, then leaves her to loiter in the foyer for ten minutes -- a harried apology offered, something about a cooking spell and how the help has gone. And then she is gone, too. Her heels are noisy against the black and white tiled floor, and it’s when Pansy looks down that she sees the scuff marks, the chips in the laid stone, the dust collecting in the corners. Filth and decay feel a silent, unexpected guest the longer Pansy idles near the front door, as though this is a dinner party for five instead of four: Narcissa and Lucius, Pansy and Draco, and last, though hardly least, the ghost of whatever Malfoy Manor was once before.

Decadence in decline, is what she thinks; she’s thinking it, moving slowly in a circle beneath the great chandelier yellowed with cobwebs (she thinks she can spot a spider stretching its legs, all eight of them), when she hears a man clear his throat behind her. 

She expects Draco, but she finds the father.

“You let yourself in, or are you merely lost?” he drawls, his words taut with the condescension and disdain most associate with Lucius Malfoy, but his eyes are tired. They are rimmed in black and blue as though punched and bruised, his skin sickly pale and not enough of it to cover the bone, not enough to hide the way a skull cuts, the empty cup of an eye socket, the twitch and subsequent grind at the jaw, the lower frame of the mandible, a strong chin, hollow cheekbones. Pansy catalogs these parts silently (she has forgotten the spider and the chandelier that hangs overhead, her attention fickle, still a girl’s though she is now considered by age and experience a woman) and meets his eye.

“Your wife left me here. I thought it rude to wander,” Pansy answers, suddenly feeling smart, tart instead of petulant (she thinks there is a difference, one rooted in how you wish the man you address to view you). Pansy takes a deliberate step forward, her shoes not as loud, not as self-possessed as Narcissa’s had sounded to her when she walked away. “She says you are without help here. I’m sure my mother could offer some names.”

“I’m sure she could,” he says. His face is immobile, but the sneer is rich in his tone. It makes Pansy cock her head a little, makes her eyes skirt over his face again, seeing a skull instead of a man.

 

 

 **I I . THE PAST**

In the first weeks after the war, the Malfoys were all her mother’s friends would gossip about. The war might have ended, but the distinct social divisions that marked the wizarding community remained. They would sit there in the parlor with their tea Mini, their house elf, served and talk about how Lucius had fled with his wife and son. They would lower their voices when they spoke of them, the same reverence and heady speculation they devoted to the dead ( _that Brown girl -- Gryffindor, I think -- was all but ravaged by that wolf, can you imagine, no healing potion for that, no charm at all, how do you prepare the body for viewing then? I ask_ ). 

Pansy was allowed to attend these gatherings with her mother’s friends now. They were allowed to talk about the Malfoys like this now. Their wealth had evaporated. Word was that their vault at Gringotts was mostly empty, that they not only had been housing the Dark Lord but helping to finance his war. 

(The Malfoys are never prosecuted. She doesn’t know the polite way to ask Draco,  _why_. She doesn’t know how to ask her mother the same question about their own family.

Her mother could offer names).

 _They are disgraced_ , her mother took to saying, her face pinched in more disgust than sympathy, and it was painfully obvious to Pansy then: she was not going to marry Draco. Not anymore. 

He was disgraced.

But then, in her own way, so was she.

 

When he sends her an owl, the war four months in their collective past, Pansy replies near immediately.

 _Yes_ , she writes, she will join his family for dinner.

 

 

 **I I I . THE FUTURE**

Pansy left the Hogwarts dungeons that morning the war ended and the sky was flat and bright. She had a small cut over her eyebrow and blood dripped down into her eye. It made her eyes water, but to everyone else, they thought she was crying. Crying over what, she would have asked, but no one spoke to her. They all just mentioned it later, her name a part of the oft-repeated rundown of events -- 

 _and Pansy Parkinson was crying even though the bint was the only one coward enough to try and turn Potter over._

She had not been afraid; it just felt like what she had been expected to do. But how do you explain that when you have lost a war. How do you say that when they have opened Azkaban again, when the trials have commenced deep within the Ministry and her own neighbors were arrested in the middle of the afternoon. They took the Notts from their house, Mr. Nott barefoot in a dressing gown even though there was snow on the ground. 

She steals her father’s copy of  _The Daily Prophet_  and each morning over a plate of burnt toast and black tea she runs her finger down over the list of names of the newly convicted. She knows all their children.

She wonders if people say they cried too when the war ended. 

Perhaps they did. Her toast crumbles like charcoal onto her tongue and she swallows greedily.


End file.
